MONOBLOC

Zone: Theater Hall, Building C, Level O

Registration. Admission is free and open.

MONOBLOC

dir. Hauke Wendler

documentary, 90′

premiere screening in Poland

The monobloc is the best-selling piece of furniture of all time. Estimates claim there are a billion of these cheap, often white plastic chairs in use – all over the world, in every country and every corner. How could it have come to this?

The feature-length documentary MONOBLOC tells the story of how this unassuming chair ridiculed by many conquered the world. How it destroys livelihoods and brings affluence. How it threatens our environment and ‘good taste’. Yet also about how the monobloc is indispensable for millions of people to whom a chair is a chair and nothing more. 

Grimme Prize winner Hauke Wendler worked on this film for eight years. Together with his camera team he travelled across half the world, from an industrial park in Italy to Uganda, the USA and on to the megacities of India, all the way to a favela in Brazil.

At the end of this long journey the film breaks our ultracomplex consumer world down to the question of what it truly takes in the life of a human being to be happy. MONOBLOC is a tale that an object tells with a critical eye toward globalization, a story that spans functionality and beauty, capitalism and sharing, consumption and recycling.

“At the beginning the monobloc was a kind of ludicrous object for me as well: no ambition whatsoever, not particularly pretty, and ecologically questionable. Over the years and the many encounters with people who at times tell very moving stories in the film, completely different issues arose in my mind, including thoughts about our world and the world order on the whole. That was the real surprise from this production: The farther we moved away from home, the more I learned about our lives in Germany and the privileges here.” – Hauke Wendler, director of the film.

* Documentary only with english subtitles.

MONOBLOC

dir. Hauke Wendler

ph. Boris Mahlau

production: PIER 53 Filmproduktion

distribution: Edition Salzgeber